I was listening to a groovy playlist last night preparing myself for slumber. It was a bit upbeat for a nighttime playlist, but fortuitously that got me dancing and dancing got me thinking. Sometimes I feel that dancing is like playing a musical instrument with thousands of control surfaces, each of my movements corresponding to a pattern of notes in the music, or in a musical accompaniment that I am writing in my head. What if a sensor, aka video camera, captured that movement and turned it into song? By feeding back the dance moves as music realtime to the user, this could be the basis of a new dance training software. The student could hear in real time the differences between her goal "dance music" and that which her body produced.
More generally, how can we introduce more synesthesia into learning environments? My mind drifts back to elementary school science classes, with wooden molecular models you could interact with through touch and sight, to chemistry experiments which heated, cooled, changed state, changed color, etc., according to what ingredients were mixed in what proportions. Why were music class and physical education and the cerebral classes all taught separately? Why were we taught to draw such large distinctions in the functions of our minds?
I focus on the music I'm listening to right now: Infected Mushroom. This psytrance music has focused my mind and makes the letters I am typing dance off my fingertips and onto the screen. I believe that this music has helped increase the scores in the mind-training games I've renewed interest in this last week at lumosity.com. That's not synesthesia, but rather the correct sensory environment for learning/productivity.
